With development of mobile terminal technologies, a navigation terminal that can provide services such as navigation, positioning, and route planning is more favored by motor vehicle drivers. In addition to navigation, positioning, and route planning functions, an existing navigation terminal generally has a traffic sign alert function. After the traffic sign alert function is enabled, when a vehicle approaches a traffic sign, the navigation terminal can alert a driver to the traffic sign, thereby improving driving safety.
To implement the traffic sign alert function of the navigation terminal, a manufacturer of the navigation terminal needs to pre-store a group of traffic information in the navigation terminal. The traffic information may include several pieces of alert information. Each piece of alert information corresponds to one traffic sign, and each piece of alert information may include content of multiple parts such as a location and content of the traffic sign corresponding to the alert information. After the traffic sign alert function is enabled, the navigation terminal may determine, according to a current location of the vehicle and locations that are included in the alert information and that are of traffic signs, whether there is a traffic sign within a pre-determined distance in a heading direction of the vehicle. If there is a traffic sign within the pre-determined distance in the heading direction of the vehicle, the navigation terminal may notify, in advance in an image or sound form, a driver of content of the traffic sign ahead, to alert the driver to the traffic sign ahead on a road.
It can be learned from above that, an implementation of the traffic sign alert function of the navigation terminal totally depends on the traffic information on the navigation terminal. However, during actual use, there are a large quantity of traffic signs that are widely distributed, and new traffic signs are set up one after another as time goes by. Therefore, the manufacturer of the navigation terminal usually needs to continually send technical personnel to collect location information and content information of the traffic signs, then manually update traffic information of a server according to the information collected by the technical personnel, and update traffic information of each terminal according to the traffic information of the server, to ensure timeliness and integrity of the traffic information of the server and the traffic information of the terminal. However, the practice of sending technical personnel to collect location information and content information of the traffic signs wastes human and material resources, and has poor timeliness.